Ministry works to help those in prison rebuild their lives

Wayside Cross Ministries building on New York Street in Aurora is home to the Master's Touch program, which aims to help troubled men including those out on parole or probation.

Wayside Cross Ministries building on New York Street in Aurora is home to the Master's Touch program, which aims to help troubled men including those out on parole or probation. (Steve Lord / The Beacon-News)

At age 30, Brian Liszka is no stranger to prisons or to the hopelessness that descends upon those behind those steel bars.

A heroin user since he was in his teens, the Bolingbrook man landed in the DuPage County Jail at age 19, and in prison at 21. And he spent six years of his life going through the revolving doors of the Illinois Department of Corrections on felony charges that often come when trying to support the demon called heroin.

But he’s clean now. Has been, he proudly notes, since Aug. 23 of 2016. And although that may not seem like a long sobriety stint to you or me, Liszka maintains that changes in his life during that time have brought him to a place of hope he’s not felt for as long as he can remember.

“Never say never, but I have no desire to use,” Liszka told me, attributing this optimism to his newfound faith in God — and to the ordinary people who do the extraordinary by dedicating time to prison ministry and saving those whose own families even tend to abandon them.

“The Department of Corrections has no corrections in it,” he insisted. “It really is a holding place to learn how to get better at nonsense.”

Liszka has, however, been fortunate to have special people enter that world behind bars, including Mary Ann D’Onofrio, “an awesome lady” who spoke at a worship class in the DuPage County jail two years ago and began his faith journey.

He also gratefully acknowledges people like his boss John Lessick, who gave the ex-con and recovering addict a job at Apex Wood Floors in Lombard, where Liszka is now starting to train others on how to prepare and deliver the product.

And he praises the heart and soul of Steve Madawick, who Liszka believes “was put in my life to be a mentor.”

Madawick is Wayside Cross Ministries’ senior chaplain and director of its New Life Corrections program, which has over 300 volunteers going into 40 Illinois jails and prisons in an effort to offer up large doses of hope.

When I caught up with Madawick on Thursday, he and seven Wayside volunteers were in the middle of a two-day training session with inmates at Southwestern Illinois Correctional Center in East St. Louis, where their “Dad’s Program” was giving those prisoners “the tools to help them connect with their kids,” some of whom have as many as “13 kids with 12 different women,” he told me.

A second program, which will be held in the winter, is titled “Freedom from Fear,” and is designed to help those incarcerated deal with “a lifetime of fear, failure and rejection” — all of which becomes heavy baggage carried through life.

Learning “how to forgive myself,” noted Liszka, was one of his biggest hurdles, but essential in the process he needed to heal so that others, especially his own family, could begin trusting him again.

Liszka is now in phase 4 of Wayside Cross’ Master’s Touch program, a state certified program that takes in 20 to 30 men per month from DuPage, Kane and Kendall counties — 40 percent come from prisons or jails — and provides them with critical aftercare at its 90-bed facility on New York Street in Aurora. In addition to Master’s Touch, Wayside’s Life Spring program works with women on parole or probation.

By offering classes, a full work schedule and mentoring, noted Madawick, “we help residents develop a new moral platform for their lives” that includes developmental tools “for them to say no to stupid thinking.”

The bottom line, he added, is if a person is not intentional about their aftercare, 72 percent will be back in jail in three years.

For Liszka, that means staying clean and working hard to “pay off a lot of bills,” including the lawyer’s fee that will help him get his license back, then eventually an apartment and the independence he’s not known since drugs took over his life.

While churches are the core of Wayside’s prison ministry, Madawick said he’d like to see other civic groups offer more than just their financial support, but also “their personal time.”

“That is the answer,” insists Madawick, who is convinced we need to depend less on the federal and state governments and more on our own communities to help the most vulnerable among us.

“We have become a third-generation welfare state and that is not working,” he said, adding that Wayside Cross has found so much success with its prison ministry because of the support it gets from everyday folks.

“People get engaged,” concluded Madawick, “when they see they are really making a difference.”